1952 movie directed by King Vidor about a white Korean War veteran who returns to his California home with a Japanese war bride. The couple faces subtle and overt opposition from his family and friends that comes to a head when the couple has their first baby. A
Nisei
neighbor discusses his family's wartime incarceration, one of the first mentions of this topic in any Hollywood film.

The film begins in Japan, where Jim Sterling (Don Taylor) recovers in a hospital from wounds suffered in the Korean War. He becomes smitten with an English-speaking Japanese nurse, Tae Shimizu (Shirley Yamaguchi), and after a brief courtship, asks her to marry him. After getting grudging permission from her grandfather (Philip Ahn), the couple return to Jim's family farm in Salinas, California. Jim's family—his parents, and two brothers, one newly married to a woman who had had a high school crush on Jim—along with their friends have varying degrees of difficulty accepting Tae. In particular, his new sister-in-law Fran (Marie Windsor) makes it clear that she doesn't approve and soon begins actively trying to make things difficult for the couple. In the meantime the Hasegawas, a neighboring Japanese American family, warmly greet Tae. As Jim makes plans to build a new house for Tae, she announces her pregnancy. Upon the baby's birth, Jim's father receives an anonymous letter that suggests that the father of the baby is not Jim, but the Nisei neighbor Shiro Hasegawa (Lane Nakano). Will their marriage survive this latest obstacle?

When Tae goes out to pick mushrooms with Jim's teenage brother, they run into Shiro. When they had met earlier, he had mentioned that he had lived in Japan, so Tae asks him further about it. He tells her that he went to Japan before the war with a friend and got a good job there. But after the attack on Pearl Harbor, things changed. While his friend "went over on their side," Shiro refused to and was "put in prison along with some other Americans" until the end of the war. When Tae mentions that this "must have been a terrible blow to your family," Shiro tells her that they "had their own troubles," getting sent to "Tulare, a war relocation camp for the Japanese."
[1]
While his sister "understood," their father "was very bitter about it." Later, when Shiro and his sister drop off a wedding gift for Jim and Tae, their father remains in their truck, refusing to even acknowledge the Sterlings. Jim suggests that "he is still sore because some people tried to buy his land while he was in a relocation center." When his mother complains about Mr. Hasegawa's rudeness, Jim's father points out that his behavior was no different than that of one of her friends, who had earlier been unable to even speak to Tae due to her anger over her son's death in the Pacific War.

Co-screenwriter Anson Bond got the idea to do the movie about a war bride while working as a producer for Film Classics and hired Catherine Turney to write a script. Originally titled
East Is East
and set in World War II, Bond changed the backdrop to the then current Korean conflict. Bond was considering Shirley Temple for the female lead before learning about the well-known Japanese singer and actress Yamaguchi's presence in the U.S. and her desire to break into American movies. The film was eventually made by independent producer Joseph Bernhard, who hired Yamaguchi and assigned her the stage name "Shirley." Bernhard also hired well-known director King Vidor, who was known for films with "a progressive social conscience," including an earlier film,
Duel in the Sun
, that focused on an interracial romance.
[2]

Production of the movie began in June 1951 with scenes shot in Salinas, climaxing with the final scenes of Tai and Jim on the Monterey coastline shot from a helicopter. The cast and crew returned to Hollywood to shoot other scenes—including the Japan scenes—in a studio.
Japanese War Bride
opened in January 1952, no doubt buoyed by Yamaguchi's high profile marriage less than a month prior to famous sculptor
Isamu Noguchi
.
[3]

Despite Japanese American interest in the glamorous Yamaguchi, community response to the movie was relatively muted, relative to the euphoria that had greeted
Go for Broke!
just a few months earlier. While both movies depicted the racism faced by Japanese Americans, that racism is largely left unresolved in the rather bleak
Japanese War Bride
, while
Go for Broke!
shows the Nisei soldiers victory over racism.
Pacific Citizen
columnist
Bill Hosokawa
complained that the the movie "was pretty rough on war brides.... Aren't any of them happily adjusted... in this country? Or are we such an inhospitable people... [that] war brides... are doomed to a life of tears?" Historian Sarah Kovner argues that the film and its publicity "made Japanese wives increasingly visible in the United States." In her analysis of the film, Susan Zeiger points out that mainstream reviewers were troubled by the film's stark depiction of racism and that several critics imposed their own views on the film by reading it as a tragedy despite the apparently happy ending. The movie was also released in Japan under the title
Higashi wa higashi
—a direct translation of the original title—and received largely negative reviews there as well.
[4]

Zeiger, Susan.
Entangling Alliances: Foreign War Brides and American Soldiers in the Twentieth Century
. New York: New York University Press, 2010.

This article also appears in the Densho Encyclopedia, a free on-line resource covering the key concepts, people, events, and organizations that played a role in the forced removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II.

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This article also appears in the Densho Encyclopedia, a free on-line resource covering the key concepts, people, events, and organizations that played a role in the forced removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II.

This material is based upon work assisted by a grant from the U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the U.S. Department of the Interior.

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The Resource Guide to Media on the Japanese American Removal and Incarceration is a free project of Densho. Our mission is to preserve the testimonies of Japanese Americans who were unjustly incarcerated during World War II before their memories are extinguished. We offer these irreplaceable firsthand accounts, coupled with historical images and teacher resources, to explore principles of democracy, and promote equal justice for all.